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MAJOR ISSUES BULLETIN

SPECIAL INVESTIGATION

BIG BROTHER

and

YOUR NHS FILES

Sue Reid

Private information is secretly being transferred from health records to a Government computer which hundreds of thousands of people can access. And, as one women found out, if you dare to complain you face being banned from seeing your GP.

HELEN WILKINSON does not look like an enemy of the State. She lives in an idyllic cottage in the heart of the Home Counties. Roses grow over the door and her pet rabbits play in the garden outside in summer.

A pillar of her local Conservative association and a Councillor, she has worked for the NHS as a GP surgery manager all her life.

It is a job she loves.

But today Helen is enraged because her name has been blackened by the organization for which she works and once trusted and admired.

Two years ago, she found the NHS had made a terrible mistake on her own medical records; it had wrongly labeled her an alcoholic after she had seen a consultant about routine surgery at a London hospital. The error was put on her file by an anonymous health service clerk.

Helen, 40, had no idea who could have had access to the file and how many countless people might think she had a drink problem.

But she was so appalled by the blunder that she began a campaign to halt the Government's plan to put every detailed health record of this country's 60 million population on a new NHS national computer.

In a spirited act of defiance, she has forced the Department of Health to wipe all her medical records from NHS files. And with the help of a sympathetic MP, she successfully fought for a Parliamentary debate, highlighting the dangers of patients' computerized health secrets being passed to the police, the security services, private detectives, or the myriad of medical research companies operating in Britain.

Helen can no longer use the NHS because she has no medical records to which a doctor can refer. When her eye became infected by the straw she uses to feed her pet rabbits this summer, a kindly GP agreed to treat her with antibiotics for free. he should not have done so.

Helen's campaign is part of a widespread backlash against the slide towards a

BIG BROTHER BRITAIN

-where everything we do is watched by the

STATE and its APPARATCHIKS

-from the way we travel to work to the confidences we share in our doctor's surgery.

As a result of Helen's actions, and that of other privacy activists, hundreds of patients have now asked their GPs not to put their health records on the £12 billion computer system before it is rolled out in two years' time.

This week, the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, wrote to every GP asking for the names of patients refusing to co-operate. It was a first attempt by the Government to measure the scale of the opposition, which can be seen in every doctor's surgery throughout the country.

The Mail has been contacted by a growing number of readers and doctors concerned about New Labour's plan for a giant 'electronic warehouse' of medical records.

When complete the computer system will link 30,000 GP's to 300 hospitals with healthcare workers from surgery receptionist to ward clerks and surgeons having access to the records.

The idea set out by Tony Blair [naturally] after he became Prime Minister. was that if you live, for example in Manchester but get run over by a bus in Torquay, emergency crews should have faster access to your medical records.

Such information could be a life-saver, particularly if you are on medication or are allergic to antibiotics. originally, most people thought it a good idea. The benefits of having instant access to everybody's records on a single database -

which is called the NHS 'spine' - will be huge, says the Department of Health. It will also eliminate the problem of missing records.

BUT today , many in the medical profession are thinking again. A poll of doctors last month found that more than half are unhappy that patients details are being amassed without their permission. Sixty per cent feared that the records might be stolen by hackers, sold to the highest bidder or used to blackmail a patient.

Millions of people are unaware that private information on how they live is already being collected centrally from health records. For instance, details of every hospital visit we make - even if they involve a sensitive procedure such as an abortion or HIV treatment - are sent via NHS existing computer network to a giant information store run by an American company in Warwickshire.

This data base lists the patient's name, age and postcode, as well as the cost, the time and the date of the hospital procedure or examination. And, most disturbingly the Government has admitted that this data bank is not completely secure.

According to Professor Ross Anderson, a Cambridge University expert on information security:

'From this hospital database, a hacker could find out about some embarrassing treatment for a sexual disease which you have received and sell it to a blackmailer.

I believe this data is already used for research by medical companies and the department of Health.

'When the national database is operational, your GP files will be there too. They will contain the confidences that you shared with your doctor over your lifetime - be it an extramarital affair, depression, an abortion, a sexual deviancy or drug abuse.

The Mail has discovered that details stored on another mammoth NHS electronic address book include every patient's phone numbers (even those listed as ex-directory).

So who will be legally entitled to pry inside the supercomputer which will store what may be the biggest electronic record of health and lifestyles in the world?

The current system is already used by 300,000 staff in hospitals and clinics. using a smart card and personal pin number, they can get access in seconds.

Professor Anderson warns that the new network will be used by many health workers in surgeries, hospitals, laboratories, medical libraries, the Department of Health, local chemists, shops and even NHS walk-in centres.

'How long will it be before one of them is bribed for information; perhaps the phone number of a celebrity or the details of a celebrity or the details of an estranged wife's sexual history in a divorce battle?' he asks.

'Insurance companies and debt collectors , animal rights activists, even a stalker will all be interested in the information.

THE Government says there will be strict safeguards to stop hackers or the plain nosey, getting into the supercomputer. BUT many ,even in the medical world, are not so sure.

[Well what do people do who are concerned with safety in airports or any establishment -they test the facilities to find out how secure they are. How would this gigantic meddlesome computer fare if its secrecy record could be tested. If a reputable institute had individuals of integrity who would test the security of the system to obtain ONLY their own records then we would see how secure it really is . On proving the unreliability of that system -the Government would have no option but to close it down as we have found they have done on other projects in their nine years of nosey invasive intrusions of their masters who should have put their servants right at the beginning of their BIG BROTHER machinations. Our view is that the whole project should be scrapped]

Eleanor Scott, a GP from Barnet, North London, told a British medical Association conference recently that the NHS's proud record of patients being able to trust their doctors to keep their medical secrets is about

TO END

'With more than 50,000,000 records being kept and more than one million people able to access the system, the risk of errors, unauthorized access, identity theft and malicious tampering will be legion.

'We should be under no illusions - no other country has ever conceived such a powerful and comprehensive tool of information on its citizens.

The contents would eclipse anything proposed by the

National Identity Card

-and it is being brought in covertly without public consultation,' she warned.

[Well we have been warning the English people for over twelve years of the collectivist ambitions of those who have sold their country to the abomination BIG BROTHER entity calling itself the

UNITED STATES OF EUROPE.

Because the politicians realized how lukewarm were many Englishmen and women to the threat to their Freedom and Liberty it was so easy for them to proceed with plans to subvert the privacy of the citizens for their own ambitions as part of an Elite which placed them above the Law and free from prosecution while the people were treated no better than slaves, but there now appears an awakening at last as shown by the backlash at the events we have outlined above which might save the situation in the nick of time.]

The irony is that the supercomputer is being introduced at a time when elsewhere in the HEALTH SERVICE, a culture of obsessive secrecy is growing.

Under the Data protection Act, hospitals are removing patients names and treatment plans from patients' names and treatment plans from charts attached to beds because they fear they might be breaking the confidentiality laws.

Even close family are no longer allowed to look at their loved one's medical records when they visit them in hospital.

So what can Helen Wilkinson do about her wrongly compiled records which have branded her an alcoholic?

Helen who lives near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, knew her way around the NHS because of her experience as a GP surgery manager.

She said: I didn't like the sound of the Governments plan. I know what intimacies patients tell their doctors.

So she decided to opt out of the system. Using powers accorded to individuals under the Data Protection ACT, she asked the Department of Health for the information that was stored on her records.

But when the files finally came back, she found that after a visit to a consultant of general surgery at University College Hospital in London in 1988, the wrong code number for the part of the hospital where she had been treated was put on her record. It showed, incorrectly that she had been at the hospital for an appointment at the alcohol abuse unit.

'I went ballistic,' recalls the women who only drinks a glass of wine when she goes out to dinner.

'Who had been able to look at these records and see that I had been labelled an alcoholic?

Literally hundreds of people could have read this about me. I have friends who work in the NHS. Do they think I am an alcoholic?

It took Helen nearly two years to get all her files removed after successfully arguing that be storing what could be secret data the NHS was causing her 'unwarranted and substantial' distress.

AT first the Department of Health did not know how to react. Officials told her it was not a straightforward request. In short, it had never happened before.

Finally four months ago she received a letter from the department promising her that her 'data' had been removed from all central-managed databases'.

'I am putting myself at risk. BUT I am not going back on the NHS database if it kills me.' she told the Mail.

'Millions of people must have mistakes on their Health RECORDS. At the moment these errors can be read only by hundreds of people.

SOON IT COULD BE THOUSANDS

What of the trusting relationship between a doctor and patient? Will that disappear when Tony Blair's Brave New World with its giant

HEALTH COMPUTER

-is up and running?

Helen, who has worked in the HEALTH SERVICE for 20 years, thinks so 'Patients will begin to lie. They won't tell the truth if they have been sexually promiscuous, or overdosed on drugs, or even smoked a few cigarettes.

'They won't want it on their records if they know those records will not be kept secret. I can see patients turning their backs on the[ BIG BROTHER] Health Service completely,' she explains.

IT IS A CHILLING PREDICTION-BUT ONE THAT HELEN WILKINSON BELIEVES WITH ALL HER HEART.

* * *

To contact the campaign go to:

www.theboptout.org

or call

01494 882458

[Added March/07]

[Font altered-bolding & underlining used -comments in brackets]

DECEMBER/06

[Well this is the time for united action by those who at last realize the dangers from

BIG BROTHER

-since the emergence of New Labour and it's collectivist acolyte Tony Blair who is shortly to leave his job and find his fortune in proudly boasting how he deceived the English people and how very easy it has been to almost subject them to their slavery.

Fortunately as always at the eleventh hour there is an awakening and we hope just in time to prevent a once proud and ferociously independent people to break loose from the yoke of submission and to demand the STATE back off as they are there to SERVE US and not their dreams of a collectivist

UNITED STATES of EUROPE.

What is needed is national campaign to demand the end of the whole

BIG BROTHER

-scheme by the instant rejection by millions of patients of the Government computer programme.

Fortunately in 2006 we have the internet to mobilize our forces to overthrow this despicable and unnecessary and nosey intrusion into lives of the people.

A determined campaign by hundreds of thousands of citizens would bring the whole edifice of the monstrous BIG BROTHER machine crumbling and for the people to take back what has been taken from them by stealth - of the freedom of privacy and obtain legislation to curb any further intrusions into the private lives. ]

* * *

DEC/06